Department of Injustice

Department
of Injustice
Affirmative
action for right-wingers

By
Max J. Castro                                                                     Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com

Placing
a decidedly higher value on ideological fervor and political loyalty
over professional competence, which has long been thought of as
characteristic of totalitarian governments, also has been a hallmark
of the Bush administration throughout its rule, extending even to key
missions such as the reconstruction of Iraq and the management of
disasters.

The
unprecedented lengths to which the Bush administration has been
willing to go in order to establish a monolithically right-wing
government was brought into stark relief by a recent report of the
Justice Department’s Inspector General (IG) and the Office of
Professional Responsibility (OPR), which found the Department
illegally applied an ideological litmus test in the selection of
young lawyers for its honors and summer law internship programs.

The
systematic ideological discrimination, which violated civil service
laws and DOJ regulations, took place under two attorneys general,
John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. It was executed mainly by a group
of young ideological zealots hired after graduating from academically
undistinguished but politically reliable educational institutions.

The
report of the two DOJ watchdog agencies showed that the work of the
screening committee, the three-member group of right-wingers in
charge of blacklisting ideologically undesirable candidates, was
highly systematic, efficient, and ruthless. The screening committee
managed to purge from the list of candidates 80 percent of those with
liberal affiliations while retaining 96 percent of those with
conservative ties. The brazen unfairness at the heart of these Bush
Department of Justice practices is reflected in this fact: Among the
most highly qualified candidates more than half of those applicants
with Democratic affiliations were excluded while none of those with
Republican associations were rejected.

The
details of how this blackballing operation was carried out make the
practices of the witch hunters during the McCarthy era seem
broadminded. According to the IG/OPR report, Esther Slater McDonald,
one of the members of the screening committee and a young graduate of
an ultra-conservative Christian college, took the lead in searching
out the ideological leanings of candidates. This included not only
identifying and throwing out candidates associated with a broad array
of mainstream institutions, including the Nature Conservancy and
Human Rights Watch, but also ferreting out “leftist commentary and
buzzwords” in the applications. The offending allegedly leftist
language included references to environmental justice and social
justice. 

This
particular instance of Bush’s larger crusade for right-wing
ideological purity is particularly damaging because it injects the
specter of lawlessness and political bias into the core of the
institution which in this country is charged with enforcing the law
impartially. It contradicts the longstanding tradition that insulated
career lawyers at the Department of Justice from partisan pressures
and ensured that prosecutions were based on the law rather than
politics. Finally, this administration’s affirmative action program
for conservative ideologues makes a mockery of basic American notions
of merit and fairness and sends terrible message to the young people
whose talents and abilities were forsaken in the interest of ensuring
the right-wing ascendancy.